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Blind Juggler Robot Juggles Without Sensors

It’s all mechanical design, and math. It’s called Blind Juggler, so named because it manages to juggle balls without any sort of sensors. Ideally, designing a robot that can juggle a single ball would be a cinch… Since robots are good at precise repetitive motion, once you got the thing going in a stable manner, it would just go on forever. The problem is, of course, that nothing works out that way in real life.

There are all kinds of niggling little variables that get in the way, causing systems to reliably become unstable. So how does this robot manage to pull it off? There are two simple tricks that it uses to control the two important variables in this system: the location at which the ball bounces, and the height at which the ball bounces. Keep these under control, and you’ve got a juggling robot.